Governments and standards organizations have created and continue to create compliance standards and/or regulations that affect and often guide the use of software applications with respect to the treatment of data (e.g., storage of data, transmission of data, availability of data, etc.). Compliance requirements can be vague or specific regarding the precise configurations that are necessary, and it can be challenging to interpret the features of a software application in relation to the requirements of a compliance standard. It is important to determine the compliance of a software application prior to purchase or widespread use of the application in an organization. If non-compliance is discovered later during an audit and it is determined that the application can no longer be used, the money spent on the software, as well as time and effort spent to integrate the software into an enterprise, may have been wasted.
Further, organizations often must ensure that software complies with multiple compliance standards from various sources. Each standard may have been written using different vocabulary or language, complicating the task of determining compliance with each standard. Further, software vendors may struggle to keep up with the many compliance standards that may affect their products, making it difficult for salespeople to provide information and answer questions about compliance issues as they relate to the software products. Determining and maintaining compliance statuses of software applications in the current dynamic, ever-expanding environment of compliance standards presents a substantial challenge for software vendors and users alike.